Page 348 of Rosetti Family New York

"Not here," I say, glancing at the door where family could walk in at any moment.

"Especially here," he corrects, his hands moving up my thighs under the torn silk. "Where you're bandaged from protecting my family. Where your blood mixes with antiseptic and bravery. Where you're ready to stop hiding from who you are."

His fingers hook beneath silk that's already damp with my arousal, and I gasp at the contact, gentle exploration that makes my core clench with raw need. The clinical setting is wrong, inappropriate, yet it feels like claiming. Like sanctuary earned through violence and love proven through sacrifice.

"You belong to me now," he whispers against my throat, his teeth grazing skin that still holds the faint scent of blood. "Without question, without escape, without doubt. And I'll prove it."

When his fingers slip inside me, I stifle the kind of moan that would echo through the mansion's steel-reinforced halls for hours. The sensation burns in me, raw, urgent, nothing like the polite pleasure of my old life, his palm pressing hard against the softest part of me, thumb circling with the same controlled violence he once used to cut microchips out of rare diamonds. He doesn't move with hesitation or with any trace of mercy. Only with the certainty of a man who has always known exactly what he is, and what he's willing to do to keep the things he loves close enough to protect and destroy at the same time.

But it's not the way he touches me that sets me trembling. It's the way he looks at me, like he wants to see not just my body, but my soul flayed open and examined, and then stashed neatly in his pocket to carry forever.

"Look at me," Emilio commands, voice heavy with an edge I only ever used to hear when he was breaking into systems Iswore were impenetrable, or silencing a room full of men twice his size.

The words leave no question of whether I'll obey. I force myself to meet his gaze, blinking through the tears that have nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the tidal wave of self-knowledge thundering through me.

He wants a witness for this. Not just to the act, but to the change.

"I want to see your eyes when you realize what you've become," he says, and it's the kindest and cruelest thing anyone has ever told me.

What have I become? The question isn't rhetorical, not tonight, not in this room. I'm the sum of a thousand choices, some perfect and some defective, but each leading inexorably here, to this moment where the truth rearranges me on a cellular level. I am his, yes. But I am also my own, for the first time in years.

And my hands, my body, my core, they all know it.

He senses the hesitation in my silence, and his expression shifts, heat layered with a tenderness that might kill me.

"What have I become?" I ask, my voice barely audible beneath the fluorescent lights and the white noise of the air purifier.

He smiles, not with his mouth but with the ghost of a dimple at the edge of his jaw. "Someone as lethal as me," he says, pushing a third finger inside until my spine bows against the unforgiving leather of the chair. "Someone who kills for family."

The words drop into me and detonate. There's no patience in him now, not after what I've confessed, not after what I've done. He wants me to accept it, to claim the new skin I wear. His other hand cups the back of my neck, thumb stroking that vulnerable place just below my ear, as if to tether me here, to remind me I am not lost, only found by a different kind of man.

Every motion is meticulous, calculated. His fingers move in a rhythm designed to rip away every last shred of hesitation. He knows my body as well as he knows a zero-day exploit or a bank's firewall. He finds the weak point, the part of me I've never let anyone else see, and presses until I can't hide what I am.

The pleasure is so intense it borders on painful, my body shocked by the speed and certainty of his touch. But it's the fact that he never looks away, doesn't even blink, that undoes me. He wants to see me break. He wants to see the exact moment I stop being afraid of what I can do. He wants to see the person he's always believed I could be, even when I didn't.

And in the harsh lighting of the medical room, with my dress torn and blood drying beneath the bandage on my shoulder, I realize this is the moment I wanted all along. For someone to see the violence in me not as a flaw but as a gift. For someone to love it, even.

He leans in, lips brushing my cheek, and whispers, "You're perfect like this. Don't ever apologize for what you did tonight."

That does it. The tension, weeks, maybe years, of it, snaps. I hear myself sob his name in the same breath as I come, the sound muffled by the hand he presses to my mouth as a final act of control.

He doesn't stop, not even then. He keeps going with that measured fury until my legs shake and the tears run freely and my heart pounds so loud it drowns out every trace of self-doubt.

When I finally collapse against him, spent and raw, he holds me in silence for a long minute. One of his hands absently smooths my hair, the other tracing lazy circles over my thigh like he's drawing a sigil only I will ever understand. I bury my face in his neck, breathing in the scent of sweat and aftershave and coppery blood, and think that maybe this is what home is supposed to feel like, terrifying and safe at exactly the same time.

"You're shaking," he murmurs, almost to himself.

I want to say it's because of the pain, the blood loss, the adrenaline spike. But we both know that's not it.

"You're not alone anymore," he adds, pressing his lips to my temple in a kiss so gentle I almost don't feel it. "You never have to be."

It's the first time anyone has ever said that to me and made me believe it.

I don't remember moving, but suddenly I'm straddling him, knees astride his lap, my arms wrapped around his neck. His hands explore beneath the ruined silk, mapping out every place that still aches from tonight's violence but now tingles with something sweeter.

"I could get addicted to this," I say, voice hoarse from crying and wanting and not holding anything back.

He grins, showing teeth. "You already are."